All around were to be seen vast changes, social and political; in the common life of every day, almost every function had been enormously changed through technical progress; Russia and America now appeared as decisive factors on the horizon of the rest of the world. The reader now demanded of the novelist that he should weigh the merits of these problems ; at any rate, that he should expose them and catalogue them clearly. The author now suddenly found himself confronted with a much more alert, more distrustful, and more illuminated public.
This revolution did not accomplish itself without an aesthetic struggle. The antithesis, ever popular—especially in Germany— between the descriptive writer ("Schriftsteller") and the creative poet ("Dichter") was emphasized afresh, defended and attacked with animosity. The question was discussed as to whether the novel was in principle a form of poetry or not. The decay of the epic in every form was proclaimed. Distinction was drawn between creations (of poetical fancy) and (mere) description. A German historian of literature proclaimed that the mission of German literature was the romantic, and that this rationalistic period was an empty hour for German poetry.
Intermediate tendencies are perceptible. Towards the end of the war and immediately after it there broke out all over Europe a tendency to make the novel pathetic and prophetic. Even in fiction, writers like to fling open their inmost hearts and to cry aloud with wild bluff gestures that society was badly organized but that Man was good. This tendency only lasted a short time. Shorter still lasted the symbolical tendency which flared up afresh , in various literatures. In contrast to these passingly fashionable vacillations the main rationalistic tendency, which since the war has gained the upper hand in every literature, is all the more clearly distinguishable.
from the individual poetic vision which follows exclusively the author's need of self-expression, not aiming at the exposition of a great continuity of ideas, nor at a fixed sociological goal, has, in this quarter of a century, found great representatives. But their influence rarely extends beyond readers of their own men tality, or beyond the poetic perceptions of their own intellectual atmosphere. Germany counts a whole series of such novelists, of doubtless great talents, whose native limitations and restrictions, however, bar their way to international importance : Hermann Hesse, Jakob Schaffner, Emil Strauss, W. von Scholz, H. Stehr and Arnold Ulitz.
Scandinavians, Swiss and Dutch have also produced the same kind of remarkable but limited novels. (Two noteworthy ex amples offer themselves by way of contrast, the English-writing Pole, J. Conrad, and the English-writing Swiss, John Knittel.) The great poet Knut Hamsun has unquestionably world-wide literary fame ; but while, before the war, he found many imita tors, to-day his reputation is greater than his influence. Among the Anglo-Saxons of this class, Rudyard Kipling rose to inter national importance, while the great Thomas Hardy has not to this day penetrated beyond the Anglo-Saxon world.